James Hynes: Kings of Infinite Space

PLEASE DO NOT

DEPRECIATE MY

NICK-NAME. YOU

ARE ONLY A

TEMP AND I AM

A PERMANENT

EMPLOYEE

— O.H .

“So you’re not leaving us?” Olivia was saying now.

“No,” breathed Paul, as he watched Rick’s head gliding away between the tops of the intervening cubicles. He glanced at her across the aisle; Olivia had a small, very sharp nose and large eyes that widened whenever she spoke to him. Years ago it was a look that had probably driven the defensive line of the Mighty Vikings, or whatever they were called, wild with adolescent longing, but now it meant, Nothing gets by me, buster . Paul’s worst nightmare was that he, like the hapless, dying tech writer, would end up working for her.

“No,” Paul said again, “I’m not leaving,” and he turned back to his desk.

MAKING RICK’S LINE EDITS — his “glads and happies,” in Rick’s peculiar usage — took about fifteen minutes, and Paul burned up another forty or so trying to figure out the watermark function in Microsoft Word. Bored by that, he tried to kill some time checking his e-mail, but no one in the department had sent him anything this morning, and no one from his old life kept in touch with him anymore. As a temp, TxDoGS didn’t trust him on the Web, but his browser did allow him to explore the department’s intranet site. Unfortunately, after six weeks on the job, Paul had the TxDoGS site pretty well memorized — for a Ph.D. in English literature from the once-prestigious University of the Midwest, he had a surprisingly thorough knowledge of the hazmat regulations in the state of Texas — so he switched to the PowerPoint slide show he had assembled for Rick and idly monkeyed with the backgrounds, making them marbled or watery or sparkly or adding one of the program’s ready-made animations. On the title slide—

Pilot Project

on

Vehicle Maintenance Outsourcing

Texas Department of General Services

— he introduced a mooing little longhorn that clattered across the bottom of the slide, thrusting its horns this way and that. For the slide that listed the project personnel—

RFP Development Team

Rick McKellar, TxDoGS Fleet Manager, General Services Division

Colonel Travis Pentoon, J.J. Toepperwein, and Bob Wier of GSD

Paul Trilby, typist

— he found a little soldier who marched to the middle of the screen, executed a perfect present arms, and saluted.

Every twenty minutes or so, however, Paul bounded out of his chair, snatched up the RFP as an excuse, and then stopped short in the door of his cube. The upper edge of the gray cubescape came to Paul’s cheekbones, and, like most of the men in the office, he could gauge the traffic in the aisles from a distance — or some of it, anyway. It was different for women, both seeing and being seen. Callie the Mail Girl, for example, was tall enough so that you could see the cropped top of her head above the cube horizon as she trundled her cart up the aisle, but Renee — pronounced “Renny,” in true Texas fashion, a tiny, hollow-eyed woman who purchased replacement parts for massive earthmoving equipment — was invisible until you were nearly on top of her. Paul was an energetic walker, and no matter how he tried to check himself, he always seemed to be blundering into her. This elicited another angry Post-it on his computer screen:

Please do not

walk so fast in

The Aisle. You

are not the

only person

here.

This note was unsigned, but he knew it was from Renee; the printing did not have Olivia’s needle-sharp precision but read rather like a child’s, or like someone trying to disguise her right hand by writing with her left.

So now Paul felt that he was running the gauntlet every time he left his cube, as he did now. Clutching the rolled-up RFP in both hands like a club, Paul dipped his head and hurried past the doorway of the dying tech writer, almost superstitiously averting his gaze from the knobs of the man’s spine rising out of his frayed cardigan and the deepening groove between the wasting cords of his neck. It was uncharitable, perhaps even cruel, to dwell on it, but this wretched man had starred in an actual nightmare of Paul’s in which the dying tech writer had arrived at TxDoGS on his first day as a strapping six footer, as ruddy as a rugby player, only to have his vitality sucked dry by a furious, naked Olivia, reducing him to the shriveled and gray-skinned husk he was now. The imagery for this nightmare came from a space vampire video Paul had seen years ago, but recognition of its provenance couldn’t keep him from repressing a shudder every time he passed the man’s cube.

Paul turned right down the main aisle, grateful he didn’t immediately bowl over Renee as he did two or three times a week, but noting the look of pure hatred she gave him even from the safety of her cube. At the next major intersection he glimpsed Callie the Mail Girl in the “library,” which was only a big, open cube with a metal bookcase full of ring binders just inside the door and a photocopier in the corner. Callie was sorting mail at the long worktable across from the copier. As a member of the Building Services staff she was exempt from the regime of business casual, and in jeans and a t-shirt she pressed her belly up against the edge of the table, propped herself on one long arm, and sorted the mail into piles with a flick of her wrist. She had a long, oval face, sharp cheekbones, and reddish hair cropped to within an inch of her pale scalp, which had led to a few sniggering lesbo jokes in Paul’s hearing. She was long legged and hippy in a way that Paul found immensely appealing, though he’d never had an occasion to speak to her. Still, even as he flashed by the library doorway, he managed to admire her long neck and the cant of her hip against the worktable and the deep curve in the small of her back. Callie blew out a long, bored sigh and flicked another envelope, and Paul turned left, up the aisle towards Rick’s office.

Here he ran another gauntlet, past the cubes of the three purchasers who served on the RFP Development Team. First he passed Joe John Toepperwein, a beetle-browed, slope-shouldered young man who hunched before his computer as if he expected to be clobbered from behind at any moment. Squeezing the mouse as if he wanted to crush it, his eyes flicking angrily back and forth, J.J. pushed the little arrow of the cursor around the screen as if he were trying to stab something. Every time Paul passed, J.J. was switching from one Web page to another; he never seemed to settle on one site, but constantly, restlessly surfed. Yet as each page clicked by, J.J. sat sullenly immobile before the screen like a diorama of early twenty-first-century office work, a tableau non vivant.

Then Paul passed Colonel Travis Pentoon, late of the United States Army, a square-shouldered, broad-chested, crinkly eyed man in his late fifties whose fastidiously creased khakis and dress shirt conceded little to civilian laxity. He had let his military buzz cut grow out a full quarter of an inch, and though he removed his sport coat when sitting at his desk, he kept his cuffs buttoned and his tie cinched tight up under his dewlaps. He was usually typing furiously, his fingers arched, his hands rebounding off the keyboard as energetically as a concert pianist’s, and he watched whatever he was typing with a penetrating squint, while the black, polarizing screen across his monitor kept anyone else from seeing what he was working on. When he wasn’t typing, he was on the phone, holding the handset lightly between the tips of his blunt fingers as he managed his money market account on the state’s time, jotting figures on a pad with his free hand. Today he was multitasking, simultaneously hammering the keyboard and cradling the phone between his cheek and his shoulder. “I hear what you’re saying,” he was telling his broker in a throaty, George C. Scott rasp, “but we’re either on the bus with this one, son, or off the bus.”